DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Whenever we fly, we phone in advance to request special meals. Airlines are wonderfully supportive of various oddball religious and ethical dietary requirements — except mine, ironically. We’ve tried calling the airlines to request “low-salt, non-wheat California organic vegan, with an occasional piece of fish so our friends don’t stop inviting us to dinner.” The airline telephone reps don’t have a checkbox for that. We settle for whatever sounds least likely to put us in mind of festering globules of animal protein, and the debilitating effects thereof on leg-cramped passengers struggling to lift a suitcase after having not even stood up for 11 hours.

This time out, the entree of choice was advertised as “Asian Vegetarian.” My wife reasoned that any nonspecific veggie meal would invariably be manicotti or lasagne, some kind of heart-choking pasta of clotted cheese and cream, designed to appease by sheer fatty heft the heavyset passengers thinking that a $700 plane ticket ought to entitle them to more than 2 oz. of warm food.

Special meals on airlines are always accompanied by a side serving of anxiety, because the delivery of these meals is haphazard. The stewards have a passenger manifest with meal requests documented, and yet their success rate is only about 70%. Hence the anxiety — maybe my food will appear, or maybe it won’t.

Years ago, when I was less strict about my diet, I’d be occasionally afraid that the airline would have my special meal. Sometimes those chicken-in-sauce entrees sounded pretty good, swimming in lipids and lab-fresh flavoring agents. But these days I’m anxious that my meal won’t show up, because if it does not I’d be relegated to subsisting on the handful of almonds in my sachel, inside a baggie labeled “For emergency use only — break open in case of cheese.”

(Yes, the almonds are raw.)

The beginning of dinner service brought a typical round of confusion, with one steward frantically flipping pages, and another peering at sloppily-scribbled seat numbers on the meal packages while holding steaming trays of what purported to be Asian Vegetarian delicacies just moments away from being inhaled by ravenous passengers, e.g. me. But arrive the food finally did, and I was grateful for it.

What do Asian Vegetarians eat, you ask? If Lufthansa Airlines is any sort of authority, a typical AV dinner consists of:

• chopped fruit salad, heavy on the melon
• a yeasted white roll bearing all the symptoms of commercial handling and underfermentation: generic flavor profile, unblistered skin, tight crumb, generally low appeal
• single-serving package of Promise, a trans-fatty acid based margarine spread convenience-food butter replacement product
• flavorless Indian spinach with little blocks of something that might be either feta cheese or tofu; chemical analysis still pending (assuming they first prove to be organic in origin)
• a scoop of tender white rice, 12 hours later, having been flattened and compressed in packaging and then left to dry out into a single coagulated cake of starch with a sauce-absorption index approximately equivalent to that of high-density polyethylene (plastic #2)

Perhaps Lufthansa doesn’t fly to Asia. That’s the best explanation I can offer.

Breakfast was even less Asian. Maybe this provides evidence that cultures can evolve more quickly than previously thought:

• chopped fruit salad, heavy on the strawberries
• white roll and Promise, left over from dinner?
• a croissant (very popular breakfast bread in the Mandarin region of mainland China)
• single-serving bucket of applesauce
• flavorless baked tofu, sauteed okra with cumin, and a traditional Asian snack enjoyed by monarchs and dynasty leaders all the way back to 1974… Tater Tots.

I noticed that within two meals Lufthansa had managed to serve the three white starches famous for being the first to go in any diet plan: white potatoes, white rice, white bread. I tend to avoid all three, when I have a choice. Probably the last time I consumed all three in a single sitting was in college, where I degreed in refined grains and potatoes (not to mention whole milk). There’s little wonder why I slept through all those classes.

Anyway, all things considered I was generally pleased with my AVMLs. In a time where people’s enjoyment of air travel is defined by a bare-bones minimum level of expected service — e.g. passenger and luggage arrive at intended destination intact and within an hour of each other — anything so exotic as an edible meal constitutes pampering. I really shouldn’t complain.

“Blah blah blah blah,” announced the voice over the PA system, although in German the words actually had meaning, or at least, I assume so. The message (I’m told) directed passengers to note the “zone number” printed on their boarding cards, to facilitate the boarding of the airplane. My wife translated the anouncement as she extracted our boarding cards from a carry-on bag full of sensitive electronic equipment. “That’s Lufthansa for you,” she gloated, “German efficiency.” She was feeling her heritage.

A few minutes later, preboarding began. Teeming crowds of families, apparently from countries that don’t espouse birth control, with too many bodies and more suitcases than legs, swarmed the gate and were slowly absorbed through the doors.

We would board with zone 4. Given our high row number I assumed we’d be among the first unencumbered passengers on the plane. But no, the gate scientists of Lufthansa are beneficiaries of advanced degrees in crowd-control technique. Their ways are not the ways of common sense. Ice is a fluid, sherbet has only 1 ‘r’, and no matter what you might believe to be true, sometimes boarding the rear of the aircraft first is not the efficient way to do it.

“Now boarding zones 1, 2, and 3,” said the PA voice in two languages.

Err, what? Why would they go to the trouble of assigning zone numbers if they don’t intend to use them? Well, it’s Lufthansa, we considered. They must have a reason.

So we waited. Many people pressed through the turnstiles. The crowd size dwindled. Soon nobody was left in line, although some still occupied seats and a handful more, edgy-looking types, hovered around the periphery in hopes of being first in line for their respective zones. I approached the desk. “Are you still boarding only zones 1 through 3?” I inquired. “You can board,” came the reply, with a look that said (after translation) “you have a dumb question only asked!”

We passed through the gate and walked down the jetway to find about 100 people queued up, waiting to get on the airplane. A brief survey revealed nearby passengers bound for all five zones on the plane. It took us a long time to reach the door to the aircraft.

Why were we waiting in line in the jetway? Why did the gate agent call three rows at once and the other two not at all? These are the mysteries of professional German plane-filling. You might think that by boarding the rear first, they could cut down on the time people spend waiting for the aisles to clear. But this is precisely why you’re sitting in your chair reading my journal rather than calling zone numbers for Lufthansa. Face it, some people just don’t have what it takes to compete at the international level.

I knew this would be a bad week way back in June. That’s when I booked a 17-day vacation in Europe and simultaneously learned about a huge development project that was due to launch on August 15. I’m not so cynical that I automatically think every work project will be three-plus weeks late, but in this particular case, I was exactly that cynical.

The problem was that the big development project had a bigger prerequisite… something bigger than we’d ever done. Something that could easily take a couple or three weeks longer to deliver than the projections claimed. Something that could keep me working nights and weekends for a month in a vain attempt to meet what I’ve increasingly come to think of as arbitrary deadlines.

The bigger prerequisite went live last weekend — Labor Day weekend, a three-day holiday for most of the country, but an overtime extravaganza for me and my team. We put in a 19-hour Saturday, a few hours on Sunday, and a full workday on Monday.

Somewhere in the midst of that weekend, I discovered that our water had gone bad: it came out of the faucet cloudy and brown, with little bits of unidentified muck suspended within. A peek into the holding tank confirmed my fears: our well had pumped out 1500 gallons of murk.

Then on Tuesday night, as I sat upstairs briefly decompressing from the day’s stresses, my wife started up her workstation. I wouldn’t have known this, half a house away, except for the terrible screeching sound, audible and soul-scarring even at a distance. I thought she had a songbird in a bench vise. I knew immediately that her computer had lost a disk drive.

Wednesday and Thursday were less hellish, but still I am extremely relieved to be getting the heck out of town.

I plan to write over the next couple of weeks. Travel usually inspires a story or two. Check back soon.

A co-worker was describing the Burning Man festival during a staff meeting. “You don’t have to do drugs,” she said. Imagine the jolt of context that provided to the few people who live out of state and had never heard of Burning Man. The reactions were entertaining.

The Chron has some great photos: Burning Man photo gallery 2003

SF Chronicle: Streisand goes coastal over Web photo effort

One of the 12,700 digital images posted on the Adelman’s Web site depicts a glorious stretch of beach in Malibu — and a lavish bluff-top estate belonging to Streisand.

Arguing that the photograph violated her privacy, Streisand filed a $50 million lawsuit in May demanding that the photo including her house be removed from the site, along with the caption reading “Streisand Estate, Malibu.”

Here’s a funny quote: “I think fighting her is really a public service,” Adelman said. “Someone has to stop her.”

This case provides another example of the risk of demanding that someone “unpublish” information: by drawing attention to it, many more people see the information than would have otherwise. As the Chronicle reports:

According to Adelman, the Malibu photograph in question was downloaded only six times in the three months before the lawsuit was filed. But once the story hit the media, visits to the site surged. An average of 108,000 visitors per day viewed the photograph in June.

Streisand’s attorneys could have, instead of filing a lawsuit, simply requested that Adelman remove the caption “Streisand estate” from the photo. It seems to me that that approach would have greatly reduced the risk that a stalker would find the image. In contrast, by filing a suit the attorneys have virtually guaranteed that every paparazzi in Southern California will be hovering just offshore hoping to catch an image of Barbra through a window.

The privacy question is tough. I understand Streisand’s concerns. And yet, demanding that a comprehensive photo archive of the coastline skip the few hundred yards she owns, just because she owns it, seems ludicrous.

The CaliforniaCoastline.org website contains a page of links to articles about the lawsuit. Every one I read took Adelman’s side. I won’t jump on the Barbra-bashing bandwagon, even though that’s the popular response — just because she’s successful, wealthy, and eccentric does not mean she deserves my scorn.

But I will say I am surprised at the strong-arm tactics her attorneys have employed. I doubt she’ll prevail.